We're
in the middle of a sixth mass extinction, and this will be the first
one—and possibly the last—we will witness as human beings.

Video
games usually provide you with multiple lives. If you step on a
landmine or get hit by an assassin, you get another chance. Even if such
virtual reincarnation is not built into the rules of the game, you can
always reboot and start over again. You can try again hundreds of times
until you get it right. This formula applies to first-person shooter
games as well as simulation exercises like SimEarth.

The real Earth offers a similar kind of reboot. Catastrophe has hit our planet at least five times, as Elizabeth Kolbert explains in her new book, The Sixth Extinction.
During each of these preceding wipeouts, the planet recovered, though
many of the life forms residing in the seas or on land were not so
fortunate (“many” is actually an understatement—more than 99 percent
of all species died out in these cataclysms). As Kolbert points out, we
are in the middle of a sixth such world-altering event, and this will
be the first—and possibly the last—extinction that we will witness as
human beings. The planet and its hardier denizens may soldier on, but
for us it will be game over.

A subset of environmentalists is already preparing for the end game. In the latest New York Times Magazine, Paul Kingsnorth—the author of the manifesto Uncivilization—confesses that he has given up
trying to save the planet. He rejects false hopes. “You look at every
trend that environmentalists like me have been trying to stop for 50
years,” he says, “and every single thing had gotten worse.” He’s heading
to the wilderness of Ireland to grow his own food, homeschool his kids,
and prepare for the difficult days ahead.

Survivalism: it’s not just for right-wing wackos any more.

Meanwhile,
the rest of us are still trying to figure out how to avert disaster.
The United Nations recently released another in its series of reports on
climate change. This one tries to put a price tag on what we need to do
over the next 15-20 years to stop the global mercury from rising.

To
implement the recommendations of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), governments must dramatically increase their
investments in low-carbon energy sources. Each year, governments will have to spend
an additional $147 billion on such renewable sources of energy as solar
and wind power. On top of that, governments need to put $336 billion
each year into greater energy efficiency in public and private
infrastructure. If we follow all the IPCC recommendations, we can expect
to save about $30 billion from eliminating subsidies to industries in
the dirty energy sectors.

That still leaves an annual bill of more
than $450 billion. This is probably a lowball figure, given the
commitment that the industrialized world has made to help the developing
world continue to grow economically without expanding its carbon
footprint. This figure aclimatlso doesn’t cover current climate change
costs associated with extreme weather events, droughts in food-growing
areas, the preservation of coastal areas, and other catastrophes in the
making. The bill for upgrading U.S. infrastructure alone will run into hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

If
you’re planning to remodel your kitchen, you’re supposed to get a
couple of different estimates. So, with a task as large as saving the
world, it’s probably wise to check in with a couple other sources.

But
those looking for salvation on the cheap are going to be disappointed.
The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization
connected to the OECD, estimates that the world needs to invest a trillion dollars
into clean energy—every year between now and 2050. Then there was the
Stern Commission report on the economics of climate change that came out
in 2006. At the time, Nicholas Stern estimated that stabilizing the
current level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would require an
investment of 1 percent of global GDP, which at the time was a little
more than $300 billion. He revised that up to about $600 billion a
couple years later, though nowadays he’s talking more in the trillion-dollar range as well.

Sorry, Ayn Rand. Your fiction has been exposed as, well, fiction.

Libertarians
have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that
it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will
wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly rewarded for
what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are peachy keen.Except
that they aren’t, as exhaustively demonstrated by French economist
Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page treatise on the long-term trends in
inequality, Capital In the 21st Century, has blown up libertarian fantasies one by one.

To
understand the libertarian view of inequality, let’s turn to Milton
Friedman, one of America's most famous and influential makers of free
market mythology. Friedman decreed that economic policy should focus on
freedom, and not equality.

If we could do that, he promised, we’d
not only get freedom and efficiency, but more equality as a natural
byproduct. Libertarians who took the lessons from his books, like Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), bought into the notion that capitalism naturally led to less inequality.

Basically,
the lessons boiled down to this: Some degree of inequality is both
unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the
U.S. isn’t very pronounced, anyway. Libertarians starting with these
ideas tend to reject any government intervention meant to decrease
inequality, claiming that such plans make people lazy and that they
don’t work, anyway. Things like progressive income taxes, minimum wage
laws and social safety nets make most libertarians very unhappy.

Uncle Milty put it like this:

“A
society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of
freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.… On the other
hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end
up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”

Well,
that turns out to be spectacularly, jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly
wrong. The U.S. is now a stunningly unequal society, with wealth piling
up at the top so fast that an entire movement, Occupy Wall Street,
sprung up to decry it with the catchphrase “We are the 99%.”

If conservatives want to ignore his warnings about inequality, we're not the only ones who'll suffer. They will too

For
most Americans, reports of our yawning, fast-expanding wealth gap only
confirm what we’ve already seen and experienced in our own lives. If
your job or industry has evaporated due to technological change or
automation, if you’ve watched your factory position get shipped oversees
(oftentimes offered, in one final bit of cruel irony, to train your
foreign replacements first), if you’ve graduated from college or grad
school in the past decade, only to find a nation with far too many
applicants and far too few positions — reports on the existence of two
Americas, one for the “haves” and one for the “have-nots” will not
surprise you.

We are living in the Age of Post-Exceptional America.

An
unavoidable fact of life in modern America, our growing inequality of
income and wealth has eroded this nation’s middle class and its economy,
like a cavity or a tumor. Crucially, this disruptive inequality
continues to expand, as confirmed by an increasingly large body of
research from sources as varied as an obscure French economist (turned
bestselling author) to the front page of the New York Times.

In the Times, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy report on new data from
the “Luxembourg Income Study Database,” which shows that America’s
middle class — long the wealthiest in the world — has been surpassed by
the middle classes of much of Western Europe and Canada. Basically, they
explain, while Wall Street booms and corporate profits soar, the wealth
of average Americans is stagnant or fading. As Leonhardt and Quealy put
it,

The findings are striking because the most
commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic
product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its
lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are
averages, which do not capture the distribution of income. With a big
share of recent income gains in this country flowing to a relatively
small slice of high-earning households, most Americans are not keeping
pace with their counterparts around the world.

The
authors are careful to note that their research only goes to 2010, but
there’s no reason to think that these trends haven’t continued in the
years since — or that they won’t continue in the future.

Our politicians have delegated power to global giants engineering a world of conformity and consumerism

How
do you engineer a bland, depoliticised world, a consensus built around
consumption and endless growth, a dream world of materialism and debt
and atomisation, in which all relations can be prefixed with a dollar
sign, in which we cease to fight for change? You delegate your powers to
companies whose profits depend on this model.

Power is shifting:
to places in which we have no voice or vote. Domestic policies are
forged by special advisers and spin doctors, by panels and advisory
committees stuffed with lobbyists. The self-hating state withdraws its
own authority to regulate and direct. Simultaneously, the democratic
vacuum at the heart of global governance is being filled, without
anything resembling consent, by international bureaucrats and corporate
executives. The NGOs permitted – often as an afterthought – to join them
intelligibly represent neither civil society nor electorates. (And
please spare me that guff about consumer democracy or shareholder
democracy: in both cases some people have more votes than others, and
those with the most votes are the least inclined to press for change.)

Sometimes
Unilever uses this power well. Its efforts to reduce its own use of
energy and water and its production of waste, and to project these
changes beyond its own walls, look credible and impressive. Sometimes its initiatives look to me like self-serving bullshit.

Its
"Dove self-esteem project", for instance, claims to be "helping
millions of young people to improve their self-esteem through
educational programmes". One of its educational videos maintains that
beauty "couldn't be more critical to your happiness",
which is surely the belief that trashes young people's self-esteem in
the first place. But of course you can recover it by plastering yourself
with Dove-branded gloop: Unilever reports that 82% of women in Canada
who are aware of its project "would be more likely to purchase Dove".

A backpack. Spare clothes. A notebook. Some keepsake photos. Crackers.

Though they may not have a home in which to secure their stuff, homeless people still have possessions like everyone else.

Yet the city of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida is on the cusp of passing a new regulation
that would make it illegal for anyone to store their personal things on
public property. Specifically, it would empower police to confiscate
any personal possessions stored on public property, provided they have
given the homeless person 24-hours notice. If the homeless people wish
to retrieve their items, they must pay the city “reasonable charges for
storage and removal of the items,” though that fee is waived if the
person is able to demonstrate he or she cannot afford to pay. The city
may dispose of any possessions not retrieved within 30 days. One of the
driving factors behind the measure, according to the legislation, is the
city’s “interest in aesthetics.”

Last week, the City Commission
gave unanimous preliminary approval to the measure, despite overwhelming
opposition from local residents who testified.

One woman, Gazol
Tajalli, told Commissioners that is “insanity that we are even here
discussing whether an individual can put on the ground the few objects
that they own.” Another citizen, Rev. Gail Tapscott of the Unitarian
Universalist Church of Ft. Lauderdale, criticized some of the
Commissioners for “demoniz[ing]” the homeless.

Maria Foscarinis,
Executive Director of the National Law Center on Homelessness &
Poverty, chastised Ft. Lauderdale’s approach. “Maintaining city streets
is a legitimate concern, but simply punishing homeless people for
leaving their possessions in public places is not an effective or humane
way to address it,” she told ThinkProgress. “Instead, city and business
leaders should work with advocates and homeless people to develop
alternative short and long term solutions, such as public storage
options for homeless people and affordable housing.”

According to the Sun Sentinel,
“The commission’s actions were backed by business leaders who said they
were looking for some controls on a situation that scares away
customers and makes visitors uncomfortable.” The commission is also
considering other initiatives targeting the homeless, including stiffer
penalties for urinating or defecating in public, prohibitions on
panhandling at intersections or sleeping in public, and restrictions on
charity groups that hand out food to the homeless.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

It's Game Over Time. We are now in The End of the World As We Know
It mode. Think those weird winters and extra hot summers, the drought
in California are an aberration... Think again.

People should have
listened to Paul Ehrlich when "The Population Bomb" was published in the
late 1960s. Or read "The Limits of Growth" when it was published in
1972.It is officially too late now. We
are over the 400ppm and will soon hit unthinkable levels. We will see
ocean rise and the deaths of millions of people.As well as the end of capitalism as we know it.We will live far simpler lives with out the plenty of the past.Earth Day was so nice and so feel good. The marketing people loved it.OTOH
the media labeled people actually trying to do something, people like
Earth First, Sea Shepherd, and ELF as eco-terrorists. All the while
ignoring the real eco-terrorists, the people who rape mother earth for
the profit of the already obscenely rich.From The Nation:http://www.thenation.com/blog/179375/let-earth-day-be-last#

“If
there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without
plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This
struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.” —Frederick Douglass, 1857

Fuck Earth Day.

No, really. Fuck
Earth Day. Not the first one, forty-four years ago, the one of
sepia-hued nostalgia, but everything the day has since come to be: the
darkest, cruelest, most brutally self-satirizing spectacle of the year.

Fuck it. Let it end here.

End
the dishonesty, the deception. Stop lying to yourselves, and to your
children. Stop pretending that the crisis can be “solved,” that the
planet can be “saved,” that business more-or-less as usual—what
progressives and environmentalists have been doing for forty-odd years
and more—is morally or intellectually tenable. Let go of the pretense
that “environmentalism” as we know it—virtuous green consumerism,
affluent low-carbon localism, head-in-the-sand conservationism,
feel-good greenwashed capitalism—comes anywhere near the radical
response our situation requires.

So, yeah, I’ve had it with Earth Day—and the culture of progressive green denial it represents.

* * *

But why Frederick Douglass? Why bring him into this? And who am I to invoke him—a man who was born a slave and who freed himself
from slavery, who knew something about struggle, whose words were among
the most radical ever spoken on American soil? Who the hell am I? I’ve
never suffered racial or any other kind of oppression. I’ve never had to
fight for any fundamental rights. I’m not even a radical, really. (Nor
am I an “environmentalist”—and never have been.) All I want is a livable
world, and the possibility of social justice. So who am I to quote Frederick Douglass?

Let
me tell you who I am: I’m a human being. I’m the father of two young
children, a 14-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, who face a
deeply uncertain future on this planet. I’m a husband, a son, a
brother—and a citizen. And, yes, I’m a journalist, and I’m an activist.
And like more and more of us who are fighting for climate justice, I am
engaged in a struggle—a struggle—for the fate of humanity and of life on
Earth. Not a polite debate around the dinner table, or in a classroom,
or an editorial meeting—or an Earth Day picnic. I’m talking about a
struggle. A struggle for justice on a global scale. A struggle for human
dignity and human rights for my fellow human beings, beginning with the
poorest and most vulnerable, far and near. A struggle for my own
children’s future—but not only my children, all of our children,
everywhere. A life-and-death struggle for the survival of all that I
love. Because that is what the climate fight and the fight for climate
justice is. That’s what it is.

The great forests are dying
and burning. The oceans are rising and acidifying. The storms, the
floods—the droughts and heat waves—are intensifying. The breadbaskets
are parched and drying. And all of it faster and sooner than scientists
predicted. The window in which to act is closing before our eyes.

It's worth noting that both in mail and in
person, I've often been asked, "Why are you changing your name?" The
answer couldn't be simpler: because it's a far better, richer, and more
honest reflection of who I am and always have been: a woman named
Chelsea.

But there is another question I've been asked nearly as
much: "Why are you making this request of the Leavenworth district
court?" This is a more complicated question, but the short answer is
simple: because I have to.

Unfortunately, the trans* community
faces three major obstacles to living a normal life in America: identity
documentation, gender-segregated institutions, and access to health
care. And I've only just jumped through the first one of these hurdles.

In
our current society it's the most banal things, such as showing an ID
card, going to the bathroom, and receiving trans-related health care,
that keep us from having the means to live better, more productive, and
safer lives. Unfortunately, there are many laws and procedures that
often don't consider trans* people, or even outright prevent them from
doing the sort of simple, day-to-day things that others take for
granted.

Now I am waiting on the military to assist me in
accessing health care. In August I requested that the military provide
me with a treatment plan consistent with the recognized professional
standards of care for trans health. They quickly evaluated me and
informed me that they had come up with a proposed treatment plan.
However, I have not yet seen their treatment plan, and in over eight
months I have not received any response as to whether the plan will be
approved or disapproved, or whether it follows the guidelines of
qualified health professionals.

I'm optimistic that things can --
and certainly will -- change for the better. There are so many people in
America today who are open and willing to discuss trans-related issues.
Hopefully today's name change, while so meaningful to me personally,
can also raise awareness of the fact that we trans* people exist
everywhere in America today, and that we must jump through hurdles every
day just for being who we are. If I'm successful in obtaining access to
trans health care, not only will it be something I have wanted for a
long time myself, but it will open the door for many people, both inside
and outside the military, to request the right to live more open,
fulfilled lives.

The climate crisis has such bad timing, confronting it not only requires a new economy but a new way of thinking.

One of the most disturbing ways that climate change
is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or
“mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall
out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times,
when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.

The
migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved
over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as
caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample
nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives
early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier too, which means that in
some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, threatening a
number of health and fertility impacts. Similarly, in West Greenland,
caribou are arriving at their calving grounds only to find themselves
out of sync with the forage plants they have relied on for thousands of
years, now growing earlier thanks to rising temperatures. That is
leaving female caribou with less energy for lactation, reproduction and
feeding their young, a mismatch that has been linked to sharp decreases
in calf births and survival rates.

Scientists are studying cases
of climate-related mistiming among dozens of species, from Arctic terns
to pied flycatchers. But there is one important species they are
missing—us. Homosapiens. We too are suffering from a
terrible case of climate-related mistiming, albeit in a
cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is
that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when
political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of
this nature and magnitude—that moment being the tail end of the go-go
’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated
capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem
demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never
actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the
midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the
collective sphere.

This deeply unfortunate mistiming has created
all sorts of barriers to our ability to respond effectively to this
crisis. It has meant that corporate power was ascendant at the very
moment when we needed to exert unprecedented controls over corporate
behavior in order to protect life on earth. It has meant that regulation
was a dirty word just when we needed those powers most. It has meant
that we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to
dismantle and starve public institutions, just when they most need to be
fortified and reimagined. And it has meant that we are saddled with an
apparatus of “free trade” deals that tie the hands of policy-makers just
when they need maximum flexibility to achieve a massive energy
transition.

Confronting these various structural barriers to the
next economy is the critical work of any serious climate movement. But
it’s not the only task at hand. We also have to confront how the
mismatch between climate change and market domination has created
barriers within our very selves, making it harder to look at this most
pressing of humanitarian crises with anything more than furtive,
terrified glances. Because of the way our daily lives have been altered
by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the
observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change
is real—let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of
living is possible.

On
this occasion, Kingsnorth was silent. It was the final night of
Uncivilization, an outdoor festival run by the Dark Mountain Project, a
loose network of ecologically minded artists and writers, and he was
standing with several dozen others waiting for the festival’s midnight
ritual to begin. Kingsnorth, a founder of the group, had already taken
part in several sessions that day, including one on contemporary nature
writing; a panel about the iniquities of mainstream psychiatric care;
and a reading from his most recent book, “The Wake,” a novel set in the
11th century and written in a “shadow language” — a mash-up of Old and
modern English. He had also helped his two young children assemble a
train set while trying to encapsulate his views on climate change and
environmental degradation in what Kingsnorth describes as an era of
global disruption. The “human machine,” as he sometimes puts it, has
grown to such a size that breakdown is inevitable. What, then, do we do?

In
the clearing, above a pyre, someone had erected a tall wicker sculpture
in the shape of a tree, with dense gnarls and hanging hoops. Four men
in masks knelt at the sculpture’s base, at cardinal compass points. When
midnight struck, a fifth man, his head shaved smooth and wearing a
kimono, began to walk slowly around them. As he passed the masked
figures, each ignited a yellow flare, until finally, his circuit
complete, the bald man set the sculpture on fire. For a couple of
minutes, it was quiet. Then as the wicker blazed, a soft chant passed
through the crowd, the words only gradually becoming clear: “We are
gathered. We are gathered. We are gathered.”

After
that came disorder. A man wearing a stag mask bounded into the clearing
and shouted: “Come! Let’s play!” The crowd broke up. Some headed for
bed. A majority headed for the woods, to a makeshift stage that had been
blocked off with hay bales and covered by an enormous nylon parachute.
There they danced, sang, laughed, barked, growled, hooted, mooed,
bleated and meowed, forming a kind of atavistic, improvisatory choir.
Deep into the night, you could hear them from your tent, shifting every
few minutes from sound to sound, animal to animal and mood to mood.

The
next morning over breakfast, Dougie Strang, a Scottish artist and
performer who is on Dark Mountain’s steering committee, asked if I’d
been there. When he left, at 3 a.m., he said, people were writhing in
the mud and singing, in harmony, the children’s song “Teddy Bears’
Picnic.” (“If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big
surprise.”) “Wasn’t it amazing?” he said, grinning. “It really went
mental. I think we actually achieved uncivilization.”

Signing petitions is one of those things.Has signing an on line petition from Care2 or Change.org ever actually changed anything? Ever?Signing petitions is an act of masturbation. It feels good but accomplishes nothing else.Last week a bunch of people who should know better formed a mob to attack Andrea James and Calpernia Addams.What the fuck was that all about?Who cares other than the marketing firms that buy copies of these petitions to send begging letters or sell products?We face an extremely grim near future between the rise of the oligarchs, end stage capitalism and eco collapse.The
time for meaningless gestures is long past. The time for thinking
those meaningless gestures create change is over, dead, no longer
relevant.Now is the time of existential
moral crisis. To be or not to be? To slip into total nihilism or to take
up arms and continue to struggle in the face of hopelessness.

I'm
glad I am old. Age is the great leveler. Knowing I have lived many
more years than the number I have yet to live is liberating.

In May 2013, it was big news
when, for the first time, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere hit 400 parts per million. Now, researchers say that number
has been consistently above 400 for the last month.

"This is
higher than it's been in millions of years," said Pieter Tans, a senior
scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.Parts per million,
or ppm, is a measure of the ratio of carbon dioxide to other gases in
the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is just one type of greenhouse gas that
has been found to trap heat, but it is the primary one emitted from human activities and it lingers in the atmosphere for a very long time.

There is typically seasonal fluctuation in the parts per million (ppm)
of carbon dioxide, according to scientists who track the levels. That
explains why, after hitting 400 for the first time in recorded history
last May, the levels declined soon after. But they hit 400 ppm again in
mid-March, and have stayed above that level for all of April.

Tell me again why we should let assholes like Bloomberg
convince us to confiscate people's guns. I love the totalitarian state
the oligarchs have created. One where they dangle puppets and divisive
issues to distract us from our ever increasing enslavement.All
the talking heads, who are paid shills out to convince us to be at each
others throats over bullshit "issues" while they transfer all the
wealth and property to their control.From Talking Points Memo:http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracyBrendan JamesApril 18, 2014

A new study from Princeton spells bad news for American democracy—namely, that it no longer exists.

Asking "[w]ho really rules?" researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argue
that over the past few decades America's political system has slowly
transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites
wield most power.

Using data drawn from over 1,800 different
policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the two conclude that rich,
well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the
direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the
majority of voters.

As one illustration, Gilens and Page
compare the political preferences of Americans at the 50th income
percentile to preferences of Americans at the 90th percentile as well as
major lobbying or business groups. They find that the
government—whether Republican or Democratic—more often follows the
preferences of the latter group rather than the first.

The
researches note that this is not a new development caused by, say,
recent Supreme Court decisions allowing more money in politics, such as
Citizens United or this month's ruling on McCutcheon v. FEC.
As the data stretching back to the 1980s suggests, this has been a long
term trend, and is therefore harder for most people to perceive, let
alone reverse.

"Ordinary citizens," they write, "might often be
observed to 'win' (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even
if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if
elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail."

On
a sliding scale of difficulty, writing a general-interest book about
high-frequency trading is slightly harder than making baseball
statistics interesting, but easier than animating the role played by
quantitative analysis in the 2007 financial collapse. "Collateralised
debt obligations," says Michael Lewis, who has written about all three,
"are impossible to describe. There's nothing harder. However, trying to
show a reader how a market moves? How stock prices move? You can already
see them tuning out."

That was the concern when he wrote Flash Boys,
an investigation into what he calls the "rigged" underbelly of Wall
Street trading. In the event, the book has sold a staggering 130,000
copies in the US in its first week of publication. (By comparison, The Big Short, his biggest seller to date, sold 60,000 in its first week.)

Lewis
has been on every talk show and financial news panel in the land,
arguing with, among others, Bill O'Brien, the president of the Bats
Global Markets stock exchange, about whether or not he and his cohorts
are ripping off their customers. If the 53-year-old started off angry,
opposition to the book has sharpened his stance into a moral crusade. "I
find this story really upsetting," he says over lunch in LA, where his
publicity tour just ended. "The idea that the smartest, richest elites
of society find this an acceptable activity. This predatory activity."

If
it's emotional for Lewis, then the responses have been emotional too,
given how unequivocal his accusations are. The cornerstone of Flash Boys
is a discovery made by an obscure Canadian banker, Brad Katsuyama,
who noticed that whenever he tried to execute a trade, the stock price
moved before the order went through. A long and tortured investigation
revealed that the variable speeds at which trading information travels
down fibre-optic cables to the exchanges was being exploited by brokers
and high-frequency traders – so-called for the volume of trades they
make – to jump the queue, buy the stocks in question and sell them back
at a higher price to the person who expressed the original interest.

"Someone
out there was using the fact that stock market orders arrived at
different times at different exchanges to front-run [orders]," writes
Lewis. It was a side-effect of automated trading and a tough thing for
bankers to wrap their heads around, let alone laypeople. In plain
English, as a colleague of Katsuyama's put it: "My role was to walk
around and say to clients, 'Don't you understand you're being fucked?'"

Americans may be living in the most unequal society that has ever existed, said economist Paul Krugman.

The
New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor said
Thursday there is zero evidence to suggest extreme inequality is good
for economic growth but plenty to suggest it’s not.“Nobody wants
us to become Cuba (but) the question is, do we have to have levels of
inequality that are getting close to being the highest levels anywhere,
ever,” Krugman told Bloomberg News. “We’re really starting to set new
records here. Is that a good thing for anybody?”

The Nobel Prize
winner said this troubling trend began around 1980, when President
Ronald Reagan was elected and began implementing supply-side economic
policies that promised more wealth for everyone if tax burdens were
lifted for the rich.

“The fact of the matter is, since inequality
began soaring, around 1980, the bottom half of America has pretty much
been left behind,” Krugman said. “There has not been a rising tide that
raised all boats.”

But he said American political leadership had throughout history set corrective paths whenever wealth became too unbalanced.

“If
we could have modern politicians speaking forthrightly about the danger
of high concentration of wealth, as Teddy Roosevelt did in 1910, we
would be a long toward a good solution for this,” Krugman said, “and I
guess I believe that America has a tremendous redemptive capacity and
ability to take a look and say, ‘OK, in the end, what are our ideals?
What do we want our society to look like?’”

If you call rigorous economic research on inequality a Communist plot, will it go away?

Thomas Piketty is no radical. His 700-page book Capital in the 21st Century
is certainly not some kind of screed filled with calls for class
warfare. In fact, the wonky and mild-mannered French economist opens his
tome with a description of his typical Gen X abhorrence of what he
calls the “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism." He is in no way, shape, or
form a Marxist. As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored
in his review of the book, Piketty "explicitly (and rather caustically)
rejects the Marxist view" of economics.

But he does do something
that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and
reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of
conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist
societies toward shared prosperity. Quite the opposite. He warns that if
we don't do something about it, we may end up with a society that is
more top-heavy than anything that has come before — something even worse
than the Gilded Age.

For this, in America, you get branded a crazed Communist by the right. In this past weekend's New York Times, Ross Douthat sounds the alarm in an op-ed ominously tited " Marx Rises Again."
The columnist hints that he and his fellow pundits have only pretended
to read the book but nevertheless feel comfortable making statements
like "Yes, that’s right: Karl Marx is back from the dead" about Piketty.
The National Review's James Pethokoukis joins in the games with a silly article called " The New Marxism" in which he repeats the nonsense that Piketty is some sort of Marxist apologist.For
Douthat and his tribe, the proposition that unfettered capitalism
marches toward gross inequality is not a conclusion based on carefully
collected data, strenuous research and a sweeping view of history. It
has to be a Communist plot.

The very heft of Piketty's book is
terrifying to the Douthats, and no wonder they don't dare to read it,
because if they did, they would find chart after chart, data set after
data set, and hundreds of years worth of economic history scrutinized.

Income
and wealth inequality have not been comprehensively studied to date,
which has to do with the paucity of historical data and the difficulties
of making comparisons between countries and populations when there are
so many variables. Piketty's contribution is to painstakingly comb over
the available data and illuminate trends that would leave no reasonable
person in doubt of the fact that capitalism's inherent dynamics create
inequality, and that only our express intervention, in the form of
things like a global wealth tax, investment in skills and training, and
the diffusion of knowledge can lead us to a different outcome.

Depriving
the homeless of their last shelter is Silicon Valley at its worst –
especially when rich cities aren't doing anything to end homelessness

Across
the United States, many local governments are responding to
skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of
homelessness among the very poor ... by passing laws making it a crime
to sleep in a parked car.

This happened most recently in Palo Alto,
in California's Silicon Valley, where new billionaires are seemingly
minted every month – and where 92% of homeless people lack shelter of
any kind. Dozens of cities have passed similar anti-homeless laws. The
largest of them is Los Angeles, the longtime unofficial "homeless
capital of America", where lawyers are currently defending a similar
vehicle-sleeping law before a skeptical federal appellate court.
Laws against sleeping on sidewalks or in cars are called "quality of
life" laws. But they certainly don't protect the quality of life of the
poor.

To be sure, people living in cars cannot be the best
neighbors. Some people are able to acquire old and ugly – but still
functioning – recreational vehicles with bathrooms; others do the best
they can. These same cities have resisted efforts to provide more public
toilet facilities, often on the grounds that this will make their city a
"magnet" for homeless people from other cities. As a result,
anti-homeless ordinances often spread to adjacent cities, leaving entire
regions without public facilities of any kind.

Their hope, of
course, is that homeless people will go elsewhere, despite the fact that
the great majority of homeless people are trying to survive in the same
communities in which they were last housed – and where they still
maintain connections. Americans sleeping in their own cars literally
have nowhere to go.

Indeed, nearly all homelessness in the US
begins with a loss of income and an eviction for nonpayment of rent – a
rent set entirely by market forces. The waiting lists are years long for
the tiny fraction of housing with government subsidies. And rents have risen dramatically
in the past two years, in part because long-time tenants must now
compete with the millions of former homeowners who lost their homes in
the Great Recession.

The Oligarch solar blowback has arrived in full force

Lindsay AbramsMonday, Apr 21, 2014Homeowners
and businesses that wish to generate their own cheap, renewable energy
now have a force of conservative political might to contend with, and
the Koch brothers are leading the charge. The L.A. Times, to its credit, found the positive spin to put on this: Little old solar “has now grown big enough to have enemies.”

The escalating battle centers over two ways traditional utilities have found to counter the rapidly growing solar market: demanding
a share of the power generated by renewables and opposing net metering,
which allows solar panel users to sell the extra electricity they
generate back to the grid — and without which solar might no longer be
affordable. The Times reports on the conservative heavyweights making a fossil fuel-powered effort to make those things happen:

The
Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the
nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to
roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative
luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona,
with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.…The American
Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a membership group for
conservative state lawmakers, recently drafted model legislation that
targeted net metering. The group also helped launch efforts by
conservative lawmakers in more than half a dozen states to repeal green
energy mandates.“State governments are starting to wake up,” Christine Harbin Hanson, a spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch,
said in an email. The organization has led the effort to overturn the
mandate in Kansas, which requires that 20% of the state’s electricity
come from renewable sources.“These green energy mandates are bad
policy,” said Hanson, adding that the group was hopeful Kansas would be
the first of many dominoes to fall.The group’s campaign in that state compared the green energy mandate to Obamacare, featuring ominous images of Kathleen Sebelius, the outgoing secretary of Health and Human Services, who was Kansas’ governor when the state adopted the requirement.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim
world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and
we’re deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We’re talking about Islam
being a religion of peace that’s been hijacked by extremists. If ever
there were a religion that’s not a religion of peace, it is Islam. – Sam
Harris

Recently Brandeis University withdrew an honorary degree promised
Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an atheist feminist born in Somali.
She documented the horrors of her life under Islam in her best selling
book, “Infidel“.

To describe what she wrote regarding growing up female under Islam as
a criticism is to do her book an injustice for she documented the
monstrous evil of Islamic misogyny that shows itself in the form of
female genital mutilation, child marriages and Sharia.

Too often Liberals and Conservatives alike treat the abuse of women
as a minor issue. Too many in academia wear their cultural sensitivity
as though it were a matter of pride and a sign of superiority when in
point of fact it merely makes them enablers of atrocities.

It is one thing to oppose discrimination against and the persecution
of Middle Eastern and other Muslim peoples. The persecution of classes
of people no matter what the basis of that categorization is wrong, it
denies individuals their human rights including their right to dignity.

At the same time it is perfectly acceptable to condemn an ideology that perpetuates evil.

That is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali does.

In turn the left acted in a manner that is identical to that of the
Christo-Fascist right. Just as atheists who come from a Christian back
ground are accused by Christians of being bigots and Christophobes so
too is Ayaan Hirsi Ali accused of being a bigot and Islamophobe.

I sometimes wonder what part of the atheist phrase, “No gods, no
masters!” is so hard for the peddlers of various forms of magic
invisible misogynistic sky daddy based faiths to understand.

To be an atheist is to view all religions as compendiums of various superstitious beliefs.

It doesn’t much matter what name is given to the magic invisible misogynist in the sky.

What matters more is what the apologists for those various religions
are supporting when they condemn those who point out the evils of said
religions.

Brandeis University has withdrawn
the honorary degree promised Ayaan Hirsi Ali after realizing that Ali
has criticized Islam in the past. In fact, criticizing Islam was the
focus of her best-selling memoir Infidel. The petition to reject her was
written
by a barely literate undergrad peeved that the university would honor
someone who is “an outright Islamophobic.” Oh dear. Views are
Islamophobic. People are Islamophobes.

Really…

Islamophobe…

What an appropriate charge for a woman pointing out the misogyny that
is so ingrained in Islam and Islamic law that women in Saudi Arabia are
forbidden to drive cars. Or how Wahhabism has forced women in to
burqas and other coverings.

Or pointing out her own experiences.

Now I know Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a darling of the right wing in
America, a position she would have never obtained had she been attacking
the misogyny found in Fundamentalist Christianity.

However considering the voracious attacks leveled upon her from the
left one has to wonder if she would have gone there had the progressive
feminist movement embraced her.

Humanist and secular organizations, as well as civil
liberties and human rights groups around the world, have responded with
outrage to the news that a new law in Saudi Arabia equates “atheism”
with “terrorism”.

The Penal Law for Crimes of Terrorism and its Financing criminalizes
as “terrorism” all free expression on a vast range of topics, including
advocacy of “atheist thought”, criticism of Islam as it is understood by
the state, and any expression deemed to “insult the reputation of the
state”.

Saudi Arabia is a current and recently-elected member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Details of the law

Article 1 of the “terrorism” law prohibits “Calling for atheist
thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the
Islamic religion on which this country is based.” The law was introduced
by royal decree without judicial oversight.

Domestic “terrorism” is defined in the decree as “any act” (expressly
including non-violent acts) which among other things is intended to
“insult the reputation of the state,” “harm public order,” or “shake the
security of society”. The terms are very broad, and and could be used
to prosecute any criticism of the state, its king or officials, or the
state conception of Islam.

The provisions of the “terrorism” law define and outlaw numerous acts and forms of expression as “terrorism”, including:

“Calling for atheist thought in any form”;

any disloyalty “to the country’s rulers”, or anyone “who swears
allegiance to any party, organization, current [of thought], group, or
individual inside or outside [the kingdom]“;

anyone who aids, affiliates, or holds “sympathy” with any
“terrorist” organization as defined by the act, which “includes
participation in audio, written, or visual media; social media in its
audio, written, or visual forms; internet websites; or circulating their
contents in any form”;

contact with groups or individuals who are “hostile to the kingdom”

and the article on “Seeking to shake the social fabric or national
cohesion” prohibits all protest, without qualification as to its message
or intent, by outlawing “calling, participating, promoting, or inciting
sit-ins, protests, meetings, or group statements in any form”.

Brunei wants to stone more people to death, and it’s
about to bring into force a new penal code provision that would allow it
to do just that.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah announced
in October of 2013 that he would move Brunei, a predominantly Muslim
country, toward adopting Islamic Sharia law within the next six months.
While Sharia was previously implemented for what are essentially family
court disputes, the country officially had secular laws though many of
those laws gave great deference to Sharia anyway.

At the time of announcing this change, the Sultan said
that Sharia law would only be applied to Muslims. However, the United
Nations and international human rights bodies feel that the law change
will likely affect all of Brunei’s citizens, if not immediately then
over time.

Making it a Crime to be Gay or to Insult Islam

The penal code change would make consensual same-sex sexual
encounters a crime punishable by stoning. Homosexual “acts,” and by
extension homosexuality, have long been a crime in Brunei. At the
moment, though, someone convicted under the penal code can only serve a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Homosexuals are not the only group to be targeted by this law change,
however. The revised penal code would proscribe the death penalty for
the following (not an exhaustive list but one designed to give a good
overview):

While a lot of media attention has focused on how this penal code change would impact gay people,
and for good reason, the penal code also seems particularly malignant
to women’s rights, something that the International Commission of
Jurists has already noted.
Writing in commentary made back in January while the change was still
being considered, the ICJ said that because of how a fundamentalist
interpretation of Islam privileges men, women
would therefore be “more [at] risk of receiving this penalty because
they are most likely to be found guilty of adultery or having engaged in
extra-marital sexual relations.”

Egypt‘s
gay community fears it is the latest target of the country’s
authoritarian government following a series of recent raids on gay
people.

Activists interviewed by the Guardian said they had documented up to
nine raids across the country since October 2013 – an unusually high
rate of arrests. Most significantly, at least seven raids have seen
people arrested at home rather than at parties or known meeting places,
raising concerns that the community is facing the start of a targeted
crackdown.

The latest and most concerning raid saw four men seized from their
east Cairo apartment on 1 April within hours of signing the lease,
according to activists. Within a week, the four were given jail terms of
up to eight years – sentences unusual for both their length and the
speed at which they were handed down.

Interviewees warned against exaggerating the oppression levelled at
what is a flourishing underground gay community. But almost all agreed
the recent arrests had frightened and perplexed many of its members. One
experienced activist, who identified himself as Mohamed A, said: “It
has struck fear within many of us. I could be sitting with a couple of
friends [at home], and these arrests could happen at any moment.”

Considering the horrific behavior on the part of so many Muslims in
the name of their faith I have a hard time believing atheist infidels
like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie are
simply Islamophobes meriting the condemnation of all correct thinking
progressive people. Actually I tend to see them as highly courageous
people standing up to a force filled with numerous fanatics, who would
consider murdering them an act of faith.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson